Some eZ Platform devs are old ez legacy devs. Some of them (like me) started building eZ websites on 3.x releases. The thing is they have bad old habits and they tend to keep building ezPlatform projects on a legacy way of doing things. But that's a bad path. After taking some time on a eZ 5.x and eZ Enterprise projects here is what I found out.

eZ Publish legacy 2017.08 is here, offering a single release to use both for the new eZ Platform Enterprise users coming from eZ Publish, and for community users that has previously been forced to pick one of the many community forks.

After a lot of thought and discussions, we finally decided to make our Admin UI code available to the public. It should serve as a smoother migration path to the new eZ Platform era for many existing eZ Publish projects.

eZ Publish 5 comes with built-in Varnish Cache support. Essentially this means that when content is published in the eZ Publish back-end, it notifies Varnish so that the Varnish cache is cleared. This feature is often called "purge-on-publish" and makes it so that you can cache your pages for a very long time, but that edits refresh the cache and thus appear immediately. To get this native support, you just have to use the "new stack" in eZ Publish. However, even if your legacy site is not ready to be fully upgraded to the new stack and you are running eZ Publish 5 in "legacy mode", you can take advantage of this native support.

Until some time ago, it was necessary to hack the eZ Publish legacy kernel in order to customize its generic error message, "Fatal error: The web server did not finish its request". This error occurs on all eZ Publish installations whenever there is an HTTP 500 status server error. It is a very common error; some examples of how it's triggered include: trying to access the value of a non-existent object attribute; the use of a non-existent PHP class or function; and too much memory usage.

Now, since this pull request from Mugo has been merged to the eZ Publish kernel, we have made it possible to customize the error page without hacking the kernel. In this post I will show you the new standard way to do this with a simple INI setting and your own PHP function.

Next episode of The eZ Publish Show will be aired on Tuesday, March 17th at 16:00 CET. Topic is very actual and interesting one: during February eZ engineering managed to externalise the legacy code which is an important step towards eZ Platform. We hope to get some more details about this long awaited moment :)